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“... necessary to consider his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be ...”

“... is the deliberate killing of human children who have a right to live. One pro-life activist, Michael Griffin, was recently found guilty of murder because he shot a Florida doctor dead outside an abortion clinic. Though he now claims he was brainwashed, he is reported to have written a letter from jail in which he encouraged other activists to do the ...”

“... hearing the word “hypersonics”,’ one official remarked to an industry sponsored conference. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, a hypersonics enthusiast, has spoken of the need for ‘maybe thousands’ of hypersonic weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one ...”

“... purveyor of fiction, although his sequence of crime novels featuring the New Orleans polymath Lew Griffin (writer, melancholic, occasional lecturer in French Lit, sometime PI and full-time avatar of the author) has plenty of superficial similarities to Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins project. Both men have received support from sharp-witted British independent ...”

“... This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in terms of philosophical sophistication and scholarly meticulousness it is a much weightier proposition. Griffin is a philosophy professor at ...”

“... At the beginning​ of Matthew Griffin’s novel, Wendell, his eighty-something narrator, finds his partner collapsed in their garden, face up in the North Carolina sun. Frank will recover from the immediate effects of his stroke, but the book charts his decline into physical debility and dementia, as well as Wendell’s increasingly desperate efforts to care for him ...”

“... about so great a figure can be wholly irrelevant, but it seems to me that both Mr Reynolds and Mr Griffin have pushed this argument a bit far. When you’ve read these books you will be exempted from ever attending to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to say so, for she ...”

“... and repression would provide the instinctual grounding of an ethics of human obligation. In Susan Griffin’s recent book on pornography, an ethical argument against pornographic representation is based on the empirical claim that human eroticism is ‘naturally’ non-violent, life-affirming and satiable. Pornography is the deformation which culture and ...”

“... as if in revenge on schooling.) At the camp, our hero, the ten-year-old Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis), is confronted by his first challenge: he is asked to kill a rabbit. He can’t, because he is scared. This is how he earns the nickname Jojo Rabbit. Fortunately, he has a jolly imaginary friend called Adolf Hitler, a role performed with great zest ...”

“... endurance Day gets across, but also a kind of fatalism that isn’t despair but knowledge. Farah Griffin, in her remarkable book on Holiday from 2001, writes of ‘longing, loss and desire’ as the topics of the songs and the singing, and this seems just right. I’m thinking especially of Holiday’s version of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’, where a kind of ...”

“... necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like Michael Foot – with Mary Wilson as one of the exceptions. Although I warned the heroine of Mrs Wilson’s Diary that I was a journalist, she favoured me with her political opinions (sound, I thought, if unorthodox) and I changed the subject, asking if she ...”

“... Reprint Library, with (as readers of the London Review of Books will know) an Introduction by Michael Holroyd, which identifies ‘David Peterley’ as an artistic fiction and argues a persuasive case for the book’s worth and raison d’être. Let me dwell a moment or two on the ‘crime’ aspect. Publishers like to exploit the weakness for mystery of ...”

“... died, has been plagued not only by Covid-19 but also by an epidemic of police violence. As Mike Griffin, a community organiser, put it, he was ‘just as likely to die from a cop as from Covid’. Major news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, seemed astonished at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the ...”

“... trying to cover up the fact that the graves had been destroyed? Albert wrote to Yeats’s son, Michael. His letter has not survived but the reply has. It is a kind letter, and Yeats agrees with Albert that ‘the position with regard to the cemetery at Roquebrune would appear to be more than a little confused.’ He had not been to Roquebrune himself but ...”

“... debilitating illness. The outbreak of war finds Edward Haggard working miserably as a GP in Griffin Head, a fictional South Coast town. Then one day there walks into his surgery Fanny’s son, now a Spitfire pilot. This is also where the reader comes in, for the novel is addressed by Haggard to this son, switching from recollection of the affair with ...”